Think about this for a second. Imagine doing a billion things, and doing all of them 100% accurately. Even if these were the simplest things in the world, I can’t imagine I could do all of them with that level of accuracy. I mean I take about 22,000 breaths a day, something that I absolutely need to do, and at least once a week I have to cough or clear my throat, or get the hiccups. So I can’t even breathe 150,000 times without messing up, and that number is much smaller than a billion.
Yet, the computer I am sitting in front of does roughly four billion things every second and does them with a level of perfection that simply boggles my mind. Common sense tells me that this should not be possible.
Miracles like solid state technology
Computers work so well largely because they have practically no moving parts. Now that we’ve removed things like floppy disk drives, CDs, and mechanical hard drives from our devices, the only moving parts are likely to be the keyboard, mouse/trackpad buttons, and the fan. The parts that do the work are all “solid state.” You’ve probably heard this term, “solid state,” your whole life and never thought about it. It refers to a device that is capable of routing electricity without any moving parts. Before solid state electronics, electrical switches and relays had to move in order to change a signal’s flow. This put limits on how fast they could work and made them unreliable. Solid state electronics set the stage for all our modern miracles. Without them your cell phone would be about the size of a Honda.
Miracles like extremely fast processing
With solid state switches, changes could theoretically happen at the speed of light. Today’s computers are capable of switching about four billion times a second as I said above. That number isn’t the fastest possible speed. It’s just the fastest speed that my consumer-grade device can manage. These things are so fast that even the tiny distances between switches, measured in thousandths of a millimeter, can lead to a “slowdown” as electricity travels along them. Chip design has become extremely complex in order to optimize the paths between these super-tiny switches.
Miracles like large-scale manufacturing
Manufacturing computers has become so routine that the biggest costs generally come in the R&D and setup phases. It costs practically nothing to make a processing chip, or a keyboard, or a USB port. The materials and electricity costs are so low that it’s nearly impossible to measure them. When you pay for something, you’re paying for its design costs. You’re paying for the time it took to engineer it, the time it took to create the machines to make it, and the cost of getting it from the factory to you. That’s why older tech can be sold so cheaply. All you’re really paying for is the cost of shipping since the design and setup are long since covered.
Which brings up the question…
If we had to start all over again, would we even be able to? Modern computer design started in the 1960s, but it built on tech from the 1940s and before. The devices we use today are largely descended from ones created in the 1990s and 2000s. Just imagine that some unforeseen calamity took away our ability to access that institutional wisdom. How long would it take for us to be able to recreate the tech wonders we take for granted today?
A classic of science fiction, A Canticle for Leibowitz, dared ask this question all the way back in 1959. The book imagined that nuclear devastation was inevitable but that some modern knowledge would be secreted away by monks as it was during the Dark Ages. The world enters a second dark age which lasts roughly 1,000 years before people start to take interest in the technology of the 20th century. It then takes about 700 years before technology once again advances to the point we are today. I won’t say much more, because I urge you to read the book. It’s scarily good and still pretty relevant.
If we lost the understanding of how to create computers, lost it completely, would it take 700 years to get it back? I would hope not but we have become so dependent on them that most of us wouldn’t be able to do what we do without them.
So in that sense, I’m glad that computers are actually able to do those billions of things every second and do them perfectly. I may not understand completely how it’s done, but I rely on the fact that it’s actually done. So do us all.
